Trip report: Hurghada Egypt, September 2005
by Amy
Posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:58 pm CET
Thursday 22 September
Back aboard the El Naghi, we went to our first dive spot, Abu Hashish. We went in with three other divers and two DMs, Yvonne and Basem. Basem went first and Yvonne took up the rear, buddied up with the lone diver. The night before, we had read about how to get accurate coloring in underwater photos � set the white balance manually. For this a white surface is required, so we brought the slate (for writing underwater), which Arthur attached to my BCD. Unfortunately when I was ready to set the white balance, I could not find the slate. I showed Arthur and we started to look around. Behind us, Yvonne caught our attention. She had it; it had fallen off of me. I tried to set the white balance on the whitish sandy ocean bottom, but the photos from this dive came out horribly � accurate color but terrible resolution. Unfortunately I could not tell how bad it was just by looking at the LCD.
Arthur rented a dive computer for the first time. It was easy to use but we noticed that his reading for depth showed about 2 meters deeper than the gauges on our regulators. On this dive, we saw a few Giant Clam, a Diadem Sea Urchin, and Bluethroat Triggerfish. We also saw a Spanish Dancer (a nudibranch, or sea slug).
For the second dive, we went to Malag El Disha. This time we were with Yvonne and Basem and just one other diver. The lone diver buddied up with Basem and they took up the rear. Basem and I both brought cameras. I set the white balance using the dive slate, this time attached to Arthur. This is the dive where we saw the most rare or semi-rare things, in great numbers. I took pictures, but they are all awful. We saw a group of three Lionfish swimming out in the open (very photogenic); two Giant Morays, just posing perfectly; an almost completely black Masked Pufferfish; several swimming Blue-Spotted Stingrays; and even a different kind of stingray, just for a moment, before it disappeared with a shake underneath the sandy bottom. Basem came upon us all looking down in wonder at the empty sand, so Yvonne borrowed Arthur�s slate and wrote �Panther Torpedo Ray� to explain � he had just missed it. The most exciting creature we spotted on this dive was one beautiful Sea Turtle (or possibly a Hawksbill Sea Turtle). Basem swam closer to it, and it swam on totally unbothered, it was really great. Yvonne had spotted it first and used a shaker to get our attention. At 47 minutes this was our shortest dive of the week.
Sea Turtle at Malag El DishaFor dinner we took a cab to HRC and ate way too much. We walked back to Cinnabon and ordered four Minibons for breakfast on Friday and Saturday.
Thursday 22 September
Back aboard the El Naghi, we went to our first dive spot, Abu Hashish. We went in with three other divers and two DMs, Yvonne and Basem. Basem went first and Yvonne took up the rear, buddied up with the lone diver. The night before, we had read about how to get accurate coloring in underwater photos � set the white balance manually. For this a white surface is required, so we brought the slate (for writing underwater), which Arthur attached to my BCD. Unfortunately when I was ready to set the white balance, I could not find the slate. I showed Arthur and we started to look around. Behind us, Yvonne caught our attention. She had it; it had fallen off of me. I tried to set the white balance on the whitish sandy ocean bottom, but the photos from this dive came out horribly � accurate color but terrible resolution. Unfortunately I could not tell how bad it was just by looking at the LCD.
Arthur rented a dive computer for the first time. It was easy to use but we noticed that his reading for depth showed about 2 meters deeper than the gauges on our regulators. On this dive, we saw a few Giant Clam, a Diadem Sea Urchin, and Bluethroat Triggerfish. We also saw a Spanish Dancer (a nudibranch, or sea slug).
For the second dive, we went to Malag El Disha. This time we were with Yvonne and Basem and just one other diver. The lone diver buddied up with Basem and they took up the rear. Basem and I both brought cameras. I set the white balance using the dive slate, this time attached to Arthur. This is the dive where we saw the most rare or semi-rare things, in great numbers. I took pictures, but they are all awful. We saw a group of three Lionfish swimming out in the open (very photogenic); two Giant Morays, just posing perfectly; an almost completely black Masked Pufferfish; several swimming Blue-Spotted Stingrays; and even a different kind of stingray, just for a moment, before it disappeared with a shake underneath the sandy bottom. Basem came upon us all looking down in wonder at the empty sand, so Yvonne borrowed Arthur�s slate and wrote �Panther Torpedo Ray� to explain � he had just missed it. The most exciting creature we spotted on this dive was one beautiful Sea Turtle (or possibly a Hawksbill Sea Turtle). Basem swam closer to it, and it swam on totally unbothered, it was really great. Yvonne had spotted it first and used a shaker to get our attention. At 47 minutes this was our shortest dive of the week.
Sea Turtle at Malag El Disha
For dinner we took a cab to HRC and ate way too much. We walked back to Cinnabon and ordered four Minibons for breakfast on Friday and Saturday.
[...] Today we had a practice dive in the Oostvoornse Meer, here in the Netherlands. We hadn’t dived since Hurghada in September 2005, except for Nemo 33 in Brussels two weeks ago. The visibility was 3 to 5 meters, which was better than when we did our PADI Open Water dives in this same water in July last year. [...]
[...] Last week we had our second excellent experience with Colona Divers, this time in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Colona is a Scandinavian dive operator with shops in Hurghada (where we first dived with them in 2005) and El Gouna in addition to Sharm. We did dives 22-30 with Colona from October 10-15. We should have started our diving on the 8th but I was feeling ill (heat exhaustion) on the evening of the 7th so we decided to join Colona as snorkelers for our first day. Unfortunately there was some miscommunication between the dive shop and the dive masters on our boat. We enjoyed our first snorkeling stop but the next two stops were for drift dives (we were the only snorkelers on the boat) and we were not informed of this - in fact the dive briefing indicated the boat would remain stationary. At the second stop, after swimming around a bit, we noticed the boat had moved quite far away - to the other side of the reef! Alarmed, we quickly aborted our snorkeling and swam quickly to the boat. The divers had a third dive but we stayed on the boat. In retrospect we could have also probably cleared up the confusion at the time but we were spooked and actually not too happy with Colona after that day. [...]